Earlier this year, broadcast giant Sky declared it is yet to resume spending with YouTube after stopping advertising on the site 18 months ago. This delivers a clear message: while the dust may have settled on those infamous ad misplacements, brand safety remains paramount for the big spenders. Moreover, protecting brands is still...

As companies increasingly adopt CRM technology and improve their data governance, they now have more customer and prospect data than ever before. They have reams of sales and marketing metrics. Yet in the post-GDPR era, with plummeting data confidence, growing numbers now admit the sales funnel is broken.

With a challenging economic climate and Brexit looming, it is not poor products or services...

Making an impression on consumers through standard display advertising has become incredibly difficult. Not only is the landscape becoming more and more cluttered as brands compete for attention online, but 40% of British consumers claim to dislike all types of online advertising, and ad blocking usage levels are

Instagram is a visual-first platform. When you log on, you’ll see image after image of jaw-dropping scenery, drool-worthy dessert, and high-quality pictures of everything you could ever want to buy. The images and videos being shared are the focus, but that doesn’t mean that you can ignore the text altogether.

Hashtags are an important part of that text on both feed posts and in...

Now that the end of the year is in sight, many marketers will look back and review the flurry of activity that was 2018. GDPR. Fighting for budget. New platforms. Avoiding potential crises. Metrics. More metrics.

It’s been a busy year – and for that reason, it’s arguably forgivable that the majority of digital marketers today are still breaking the very first rule of marketing: build the...

The opportunities through location and proximity based mobile advertising are well recognised now, and retailers wanting to increase sales by bringing more people into their store have a variety of options when it comes to footfall tracking capabilities.

These allow retailers and advertisers to estimate the number of visits to a store and measure the incremental impact of proximity focused campaigns on the number of visits to...

The temptation to skip an advert when it is forced upon us is never terribly far away. When that option isn’t there, like the data capture gatekeeper making sure we can’t yet access the oasis of content ahead, it is almost as if a sense of foreboding has come over our very souls.

This admittedly might be a slight overreaction. Plus it could be worse – non-skippable ads are usually only six seconds in length,...

The days when the one-directional, sweeping message of the billboard ruled are well in the past. Now, as ad blocking continues to grow in popularity, marketers are faced with the constant pressure of trying to come up with innovative ways of capturing people’s attention without being intrusive.

As we enter a new era where advertising will no longer be invasive or off-target, it looks likely that we are finally reaching the advertising Nirvana of creating a hyper-personalised UX that consumers may...

Publishers are under immense pressure to provide high-volume traffic in order to meet demand, especially with prices reducing over time. Because of this, they will often reach out to third parties in order to increase their traffic volume, known as traffic-sourcing.

While there are reliable sources, there are also many fraud schemes in this arena, some of which are very difficult to stop and prevent. These smart fraud schemes look like other sourced traffic on the surface, enticing publishers to buy even more...

Forget the products and services you’re offering for a minute; your brand’s visual presence is arguably the most powerful way to resonate with your audience.

But don’t think a visual identity is about colour palettes and kerning. In a crowded and noisy digital marketing landscape, brands have to consider frequency, volume and variety across an ever-growing range of customer touchpoints, often spanning multiple markets.

Grant Munro is the senior VP of Shutterstock Custom, and an expert in changing the way...

A “worrying gap” has been discovered between the low adoption of digital marketing by management consultancy firms and the digital-first approaches now demanded by their clients.

As reported by Consultancy.UK and part of the UK-based ‘State of Digital Marketing in Professional Services 2018’ report, a reliance on traditional word of mouth referrals is lingering among professional...

Last month, there was another brouhaha in the programmatic ad world. It was revealed that was a new ad-buying practice was happening and apparently very few people knew that it is going on.

Devised by the ad marketplace Index Exchange and hailed as the latest innovation in programmatic bidding we discovered a practice called ‘bid caching’. New technology that was designed to reduce latency, thereby creating faster ad serving. It...

Marketers are always on the hunt for the latest in innovative tech in a quest to snare prospective customers with the wow-factor.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are two such technologies touted as the next to revolutionise the retail landscape, however, a new study by Censuswide and payments provider Klarna suggests customers don’t share the same enthusiasm.

Interviewing 2,000 shoppers, the study revealed that four in five had no interest in these technologies, suggesting that marketers...

Search accounted for half of all digital ad spend in the UK in the first half of 2018, according to the latest Digital Adspend report published by the IAB UK (Internet Advertising Bureau) and PwC.

In total, digital advertising saw a 15% year-on-year increase amounting to £6.36bn. Enjoying the same rate of growth, spend on search advertising amounted to more than half of that (52%), amounting to £3.3bn.

Non-video display spend was next highest at £1.33bn, a rise of 9% on last year’s...

Most loyalty programs fail to make the mark as they lack value proposition. According to a recent study, 71% of consumers claim loyalty incentive programs don’t make them loyal. That happens because brands fail to adapt to the rapidly changing digital landscape.

That’s why the next generation of consumers is more interested in relevance. It will be the...

As if Facebook needed another mountain in user trust to climb this year, evidence has now emerged of it using phone numbers provided for security purposes to target unsuspecting users with ads.

The activity was uncovered by researchers from Northeastern University and Princeton, along with the tech publisher Gizmodo, following controlled trials where an ad was successfully targeted using phone numbers that had been provided for account security and, in one case, had never been explicitly provided to the...

Thanks to the hyper-connected, ‘always on’ world in which we now live, the opportunity for brands to drive commerce is literally everywhere. As with other areas of our lives, connected mobile devices have changed the way we think about buying things; when it comes to shopping, we’re no longer bound by ‘restrictions’ such as location and time of day.

63% of UK display ads were considered “viewable” in the first half of the year according to a study this week by Integral Ad Science. That was considered an “all-time high”, and it means that nearly three-fifths of ad units were in view for one continuous second - or two seconds if we’re talking video.

The findings were based on a widely-used industry standard set by the Media Rating Council...